In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Word Unheard: Legacies of Anti-Semitism in German Literature and Culture by Martha B. Helfer
  • Karin Schutjer
The Word Unheard: Legacies of Anti-Semitism in German Literature and Culture. By Martha B. Helfer. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011. xxiii + 233 pages. $34.95.

The Word Unheard charts the development of discourses of latent anti-Semitism that lie half concealed, "hidden all too obviously out in the open" (xiii), in literary works [End Page 330] in the era of Jewish emancipation. Helfer's readings take off from textual dissonances, including "contradictions between the text's surface message and the language used to convey this message; mention of a theme that then disappears; plots that don't make sense or have obvious lacunae; narrators that cannot be trusted; and so on" (xv). Her six chapters cover canonical authors writing from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, who neatly represent major periods in German literature: Lessing, Schiller, von Arnim, Droste, Stifter, Grillparzer. While the book thus follows the structure of a conventional literary history or survey course, it illuminates the underside of this tradition: the anti-Semitic subtexts that to this day are rarely acknowledged by German scholars.

Multiple factors seem to have led to the semi-encryption of anti-Semitism in the diverse works under analysis. Helfer shows that some texts with universalist or politically progressive commitments are nevertheless divided against themselves, revealing beneath the surface far greater ambivalence towards Jews than usually recognized. Other works are hardly ambivalent towards emancipation—the authors are clearly opposed—but they adopt an ambiguous, cryptic style of representation in order to mimic the nature of the perceived Jewish threat (i.e. disguised and insidious). The outcome in any case is a distinct cultural code with a long and destructive reach in German history.

The book begins with Lessing, the traditional paragon of Christian friendship and tolerance towards Judaism. But Helfer shows how Lessing nevertheless re-inscribes in his texts precisely the negative characterizations of Jews that he is overtly seeking to overcome. Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, his Enlightenment treatise on the ultimate triumph of reason, reproduces a narrative of Christian supersession over Judaism. In the play Die Juden Lessing questions prejudices regarding the way Jews look and act with regard to the main character, only to create doubt in the mind of the audience about additional hidden Jews. Nathan der Weise, while seeking to overcome the divisions among the three Abrahamic religions, ends up still isolating Judaism, both as a matter of "blood" and because of Judaism's claim to an originary status, which in turn could be destabilizing for the play's interfaith truce. In Chapter Two on Friedrich Schiller's essay "Die Sendung Moses" on the Exodus story, Helfer shows that Schiller also employs a supersessionary narrative: he casts himself implicitly as a modern-day Moses bringing Enlightenment to a benighted people. Within this account, Jews epitomize all that is to be left behind. Despite his universalistic pretensions, he engages in rhetoric that both draws on medieval calumnies and anticipates racial anti-Semitism: Jews are well-poisoners, permanently degenerate, impure and diseased.

If Lessing's Enlightenment humanism marks a high point of tolerance within the book, Achim von Arnim's Romantic nationalism represents a distinct nadir. Helfer lays out von Arnim's obsession with hidden Jews and Jewish converts in his speech to the Christian-German Table Society, "Über die Kennzeichen des Judenthums," a polemic so venomous that it is rarely reproduced or translated. In his contemporaneous narrative "Isabella von Ägypten," von Arnim deploys "the Jew" as a shifting, seductive, often illegible but pervasive signifier that remains both antithetical to, and indispensable for, his conception of a German nation.

The final three chapters focus on three mid-century works that all seem, on the surface, to include gestures of sympathy toward Jews and indeed have been celebrated [End Page 331] by some as pro-Jewish. But Helfer shows that in each case, broader narrative subtexts or structures have quite the opposite thrust. In her tour de force interpretation of Droste-Hülshoff's novella Die Judenbuche, Helfer argues that secret Jewish blood running through an ill-fated...

pdf

Share